Critical Essay by Gaston Bachelard

SOURCE: "The Philosophic Dialectic of the Concepts of Relativity," in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, revised edition, edited by Paul Arthur Schlipp, The Library of Living Philosophers, 1970, pp. 565-80.

Bachelard was an influential French philosopher and critic. Many of his writings focus on poetic imagery and its relation to the creative process, and their approach is characterized by an emphasis on psychoanalytic theory. Unlike Sigmund Freud, who regarded dreams as manifestations of an individual's motivations, Bachelard, like Carl Jung, considered dreaming to be a revelation of the collective unconscious. Bachelard thus looked to dreaming, or reverie, for certain primitive archetypes—especially the traditional elements of earth, air, fire, and water—and studied representations of each in poetic imagery. In the following essay, Bachelard discusses the ways in which Einstein's relativity created "upheavals" among many of the fundamental principles of science...